Topic: The Movie Thread

@zupertramp The only people left complaining to Netflix or begging them to take the film off their service are those who haven't watched and are purely going off the trailer. It's a difficult film to watch for sure, but not the absolute dumpster fire advertised by Netflix and their wack marketing team

@TheFrenchiestFry Yeah, I agree that it was a difficult film to watch. But Lolita was also a difficult film to watch and openly has a pedophile as the (sorta) protagonist. Hell, speaking as somebody who really likes Rosemary’s Baby, plenty movies in Hollywood were made by pedophiles. It feels like a certain group who totally coincidentally are the same group who attack Netflix for having black people in The Witcher scored an open goal that Netflix created through their terrible marketing. It’s a shame that it’s the director who suffered as a result.

@zupertramp Shame you didn't enjoy The Lighthouse (or Misdsommar). They are hard ones to reccomend. I appreciate that they didn't rely on quiet-quiet-BANG-BANG moments or on bucket loads of gore/blood. I did get so far with The Lighthouse and was thinking what the fudge is going on, but then it clicked and it kinda won me over from then on.

@JohnnyShoulder I feel like those are films you have to really be in a specific state of mind to truly enjoy. Lighthouse is a film that seeks to really mess with your mind with all the imagery and how engaging the story about these two guys slowly losing their mind as they're isolated from the rest of civilization really is, but at the same time it's still not above a fart joke

@TheFrenchiestFry It was the fart jokes that really won over lmao. That did take me surprise and I had to rewind it to make sure I wasn't hearing things.

@TheFrenchiestFry @JohnnyShoulder One other thing I forgot to mention is I wasn't at all a fan of that aspect ratio. Black and white, fine. A little graininess, cool. But this crap where I have to see giant black bars on the sides of my expensive widescreen tv is just dumb. The movie would be no different in widescreen format so please, stop making me feel like I can't see anything and just show the whole frame. Anyway, rant over.

@zupertramp "b--but muh ARTISTRYYYY"

nah in all seriousness I can understand when people are peeved out by choices like that, although I do personally like how it's presented at that ratio because it emulates a feeling of clausterphobia that is already prevalent throughout the film through its choice of setting as well as its themes

I’m a fan of different aspect ratios. Especially when they’re played around with like in The Grand Budapest Hotel. The Painted Bird suited it at 2:39 as well.

@TheFrenchiestFry yeah i figured he was either going for a literal boxed-in feel or just wanted the look of a really old film but I just found it too frustrating. I usually try to give some leeway for artistic risk but in cases like this, I really would prefer filmmakers make use of the dimensions of modern screens.

That said, the rest of my family said they got used to it and forgot about it after a while.

@nessisonett My personal favorite implementation of different filming styles was in Steve Jobs where each time period pertaining to a specific Apple product unveiling was shot with three different film formats. I believe it was 16mm for 1984, 38mm for 1988 and completely digital for 1998

@TheFrenchiestFry Yeah that’s similar to The Grand Budapest Hotel where the 1932 sections are in 1.37:1, the Academy ratio, the 1968 sections are in 2.40:1, the widescreen format used in the 60s and 70s and the 1980s sections are in 1.85:1, the most common modern aspect ratio.

@TheFrenchiestFry @nessisonett It Comes at Night does this too, with dream sequences appearing in a different ratio to the rest of the film. Thought it worked to really good effect in the film. The below is a extract from an interview with the director.

"Why were the different aspect ratios in the film so important to your story?

So the bulk of the movie is in 2.40:1, with spherical lenses. That’s our reality approach. What always interested me in the movie is, along the way, there are these nightmares. Film-grammar-wise, how do you play with that? You could go so many different routes. You could make a full nightmare, just announce it. But once again, taking it to the character, I want to experience it like Travis does. So our film grammar and how we shoot it doesn’t change, and the lighting doesn’t change. But we subtly use different lenses. We use anamorphic lenses for all the nightmares, and we subtly change aspect ratio, either through a fade, or slowly compressing. The bars at the top and bottom close in, and it goes from 2.40:1 to 2.75:1. And the climax is when reality has become a nightmare. The music side, the aspect ratio, and the lenses converge. Over a prolonged sequence, the bars are slowly closing in, getting more and more claustrophobic, until they’re stuck in 3.0:1 for the rest of the movie. We also go handheld as reality truly becomes nightmare, once a certain line has been crossed. We’re handheld, tight in, so it’s nauseous."

https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/8/15762548/it-comes-at-night-...

@nessisonett @JohnnyShoulder @TheFrenchiestFry

I really enjoyed It Comes at Night and though it's been awhile I remember liking Grand Budapest Hotel but I don't recall any off-putting aspect ratios which leads me to the conclusion that The Lighthouse just overdoes it a bit. For me.

Also I had planned to rewatch It Comes at Night at some point but had kinda forgotten about it so thanks for bringing it up. This is as good a time as any.

lol

Midsommar, Hereditary, and The Lighthouse are easily my favorite "horror" films of the last decade (of the three, only Hereditary is played as a straightforward horror flick; The Lighthouse is an arthouse oddity, and Midsommar uses the tropes of horror for other purporses), but I can also understand people not liking them. Anything that veers hard away from mainstream expectations is going to limit its appeal, and that's fine.

Not sure what the deal is with The Lighthouse's odd aspect ratio, either, since the majority of old films were in 4:3, not that square shape. I didn't have an issue with it, though, since the actual imagery and cinematography was mesmerizing. Also, the insane interactions between Pattinson and DaFoe later in the film and the overt homoeroticism of the entire affair made it a consistently enjoyable watch for me.

Yeah, I wasn’t a fan of Midsommar but it just isn’t to my tastes at all. For whatever reason it just wasn’t for me. The Lighthouse on the other hand is incredible and easily one of the best movies I’ve seen in a long time. It nails both style and substance while having deep rooted themes. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was studied by film students in a year or two and was the subject of many a dissertation.

@Ralizah I'll add The Witch onto that list, which I slightly preffered to The Lighthouse. I known you weren't a huge fan, but I also liked Get Out and Us too, the former for having a bit of a sense of humour about it. Which is tricky to get right in horror films. Mind you I found the scene when they are all tied down in the original The Thing funny, so I have a weird sense of humour at times.

The Witch and Hereditary were really really good, until they weren't. I prefer eerieness over jump scares but movies like these, that seem to do eerie so well, have the worst payoffs. I want someone to couple that overarching feeling of dread and concern with an ending that recreates the absolute holy crap moment I had when Samara crawled out of the TV. But that's just me.

@JohnnyShoulder I actually don't dislike Jordan Peele's horror films. Get Out was a clever race satire (hardly the masterpiece critics made it out to be, but I guess that just reflects how rare it is to see a film about black consciousness and culture get that sort of mainstream attention), and Us... was interesting. It's certainly better than The Conjuring 52 or whatever, but it felt like a message film with a supremely confused script. Part of why Get Out worked is because its central metaphor for black cultural alienation ("the sunken place") and attack on smug white liberalism and cultural appropriation were both intuitive. Us lacks the same focus and intuitiveness, so it just ended up feeling weird.

On the subject of humor, I also found the extreme tonal shifts from horror to comedy in Us to be jarring. It didn't feel like a horror-comedy, really. It just doesn't feel like it knows what it wants to be.

The VVitch... unpopular opinion, probably, but that movie practically bored me to death. I'm sure it's a good film, but it did nothing for me.

On the horror-comedy front, I really, really liked Ready or Not. Perfect mix of paranoia, comedy, and some truly horrific violence. And the ending is just the best thing ever. There's probably some satirical class warfare stuff in there, too, but I think the film can be enjoyed purely on a superficial level.

@zupertramp Interesting. I thought Hereditary's climactic twist was a great shock that managed to pull the experience together. It felt really out of left field at first, but upon rewatching it, it helps to contextualize the nightmarish events that occur.

EDIT: I lied. I thought The Babadook was older than it is. I'm kicking The Lighthouse off my top 3 horror films of the decade, then.

Really sad to hear about Sean Connery, he’s easily one of the most iconic actors to come out Scotland. I love his absolute lack of accent in every film he did, especially Highlander where he was ‘Spanish’ and The Hunt For Red October where he’s ‘Russian’. Lord, even in The Untouchables he’s ‘Irish’ but just sounds like Sean Connery. Only he could pull it off.

Yeah, so sad about Connery. Truly an icon in the industry.